My parents threw me out at nineteen because I wouldn’t end my pregnancy. Ten years later I drove back with my son and knocked on the same door and I finally told them who his father was.

child that age should have to notice, which is my fault and not his.

And the questions got harder to get round.

Why don’t we ever see Grandma and Grandpa?

At six I said they live a long way away. At eight I said it is complicated. At nine he stopped asking for about a year, which was worse.

Because I could not make myself walk back into a house where two people had chosen their pride over their own daughter.

Then, on his tenth birthday, after the cake, he looked at me with that face he does and said:

Can I meet them? Just once?

And I sat there and worked out that I owed him that, and that I had been calling it protection for ten years when for at least four of them it had been something else.

I said yes on the Tuesday and then spent